Considering all the wailing and gnashing of teeth around the use of Flock cameras, both pro and con, I wondered if we had the perfect surveillance system if it would create a world worth living in. Let me know your thoughts, pro and con, and please share.
by Joe Broadmeadow
The first body turned up behind the Carver Street laundromat on a Tuesday in July. Forty-one people were within sight of the shooting. Every one of them told the detectives the same thing: didn’t see nothing.
By October there were nine bodies, and the number of people who had seen nothing had passed three hundred. Crowded bodegas, a packed bus shelter, a Little League game in the fifth inning.
The killer didn’t bother to hide because he didn’t need to. Fear had done the hiding for him.
Frank Dolan worked the Carver Street case for the full eleven months it stayed open. He knocked on eleven hundred doors. He found a grandmother who admitted, behind a closed kitchen door, that she had seen the whole thing from her window, and then begged him not to write her name down.
He didn’t. She was found in her stairwell three weeks later anyway, and after that the doors stopped opening at all.
So, when the Senator stood at the podium in the Rose Garden and said, “Never again will a murderer in America count on silence,” Frank understood why the applause went on so long. He clapped too, alone in his kitchen, in front of the television.
* * *
They named it ARGUS, after the hundred-eyed giant of Greek myth, but nobody called it that for long.
It was just the Eye.
It took three years and a sum of money nobody could say out loud without flinching. Satellites in low orbit. Cameras on every light pole, every traffic signal, every doorbell whose owner took the tax credit, which was everyone.
Thermal, acoustic, radar that could see through a wooden wall. And behind it all, the machine: a system that did not merely record but understood, watching three hundred and forty million people at once and flagging every act that met the statutory definition of a crime.
The first year, the Eye solved every murder in the United States. Every one. Average time from the fatal act to arrest was eleven minutes.
The killers stopped because what was the point? The murder rate fell by ninety-one percent. Frank’s old department held a retirement luncheon for the entire homicide unit on a single afternoon, sheet cake and all.
“You earned the rest,” the chief told him, pumping his hand. “The machine’s got it now.”
* * *
The changes after that came slowly, and each one made sense on its own.
The Evidentiary Certainty Act came first. Defense lawyers had discovered that human testimony, set beside the Eye’s perfect record, looked shabby. Witnesses misremembered colors, heights, and the order of events.
The Eye never did.
Juries began refusing to convict on testimony alone, and then refusing to acquit on it. Congress made it official: uncorroborated human recollection was inadmissible in any criminal proceeding where Eye data existed.
And Eye data always existed.
The newspapers called it the end of the mistaken-identity conviction. Frank thought of the grandmother in the stairwell and supposed they were right.
The second change nobody legislated. People simply stopped watching.
There was no reason to. A fender-bender, a shoplifter, a shouting match outside a bar: the Eye had it, from nine angles, in high definition. Why look up from your phone? Why remember anything?
Frank noticed it first on the bus, then in the grocery store, then everywhere. Heads down. Eyes elsewhere. A kind of civic sleep. Once, a woman dropped a full bag of oranges on the sidewalk in front of him, and sixty people stepped around them like water around a rock.
The third change was a budget line. The original plan had the Eye dispatching ambulances as well as police. Still, the medical-response module ran four hundred billion over projection.
The fiscal compromise of the second year cut it. The Eye would watch for crimes. Only crimes. The notice ran on page eleven. Most people never read it, and the ones who did forgot, because the Eye was everywhere and surely the Eye would call.
* * *
Frank was seventy-three that October afternoon he sat on a bench in Kennedy Plaza with a cup of coffee going cold between his hands.
The man in the tan raincoat was maybe sixty, walking fast, briefcase in one hand. Frank watched him because watching was forty years of a habit he had never been able to retire. He saw the man slow. Saw the hand drift to the chest, the briefcase drop, the knees go.
Saw him fold onto the concrete near the fountain like a coat slipping off a hook.
Frank counted. Twenty-two people walked past in the first minute. A few glanced down. One woman actually slowed, looked up toward the nearest light pole with its small black dome, nodded to herself as if a matter had been settled, and kept going.
Frank was halfway off the bench, his bad knee screaming, when the kid got there first.
He couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Delivery jacket, earbuds, a bike he let clatter to the ground. He dropped beside the man, rolled him flat, put an ear to his mouth. Then he jammed his hands into the raincoat pockets, one after the other, frantic, and pulled out a phone and a small orange pill bottle, which he stared at and threw aside. He dialed with his thumb. Then he laced his fingers together, locked his elbows, and started pushing down on the man’s chest, hard, hard, the way they teach you, the way that breaks ribs if you are doing it right.
Frank heard them crack from ten feet away.
“Come on,” the kid kept saying. “Come on, come on, come on.”
The ambulance took nineteen minutes. The police took four.
* * *
Frank read the charging document in the office of a public defender named Alvarez, who looked like a woman who had been losing for a long time.
Subject approaches Victim (incapacitated). Subject forcibly searches Victim’s clothing; removes phone and personal property. Subject delivers repeated blunt-force compressions to Victim’s thoracic cavity; fracture of four ribs confirmed. Victim deceased at scene. Classification: Robbery; Homicide, Second Degree. Confidence: 98.7%.
“The Eye reads what it’s trained to read,” Alvarez said. “A man goes through a helpless stranger’s pockets and takes his property. A man strikes another man in the chest thirty times until his bones break. What do you think it was trained on? Assaults. Muggings. It was never trained on rescue, because rescue was the ambulance module, and that got cut.”
“The cardiac arrest,” Frank said. “The man was dying before the kid touched him.”
“The autopsy says the heart failed. The prosecution says it failed because my client was beating on it. The Eye says ninety-eight point seven.” She looked at him. “And the man had a pill bottle in his pocket. My client threw it away. Nitroglycerin. The Eye flagged that too.”
“He didn’t know what it was. He was nineteen. He was trying.” Frank leaned forward. “I was there. I saw the whole thing. I’ll testify.”
Alvarez smiled then, and it was the saddest thing Frank had seen in forty years of looking at sad things.
“Mr. Dolan,” she said, “you’re uncorroborated human recollection.”
* * *
They canvassed the plaza anyway because Alvarez was stubborn and Frank was more so. Forty people identified from the Eye’s own footage as having passed within twenty feet of the dying man.
Frank knocked on every door he could find.
Not one of them remembered the man in the raincoat. Not one remembered the kid. They had not been afraid. They had simply not been looking.
The trial took two days. The jury deliberated for forty minutes.
Frank sat in the back row when they read the verdict. The kid’s mother made a sound he had heard before, on other doorsteps, in other years. Frank looked up at the small black dome in the courtroom ceiling, and he thought about Carver Street, and the nine bodies, and the three hundred people who had seen nothing.
They had built the Eye because no one would come forward.
This time someone had. This time a witness stood ready, willing, sworn, desperate to tell the truth.
The Eye had simply made sure it didn’t matter.
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